Last of three exclusive excerpts from Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

By Margaret Atwood

In the course of riffling through obscure books that, at that time, nobody but me was interested in, I discovered lots and lots of utopias. The 19th century, especially the second half of it, was so cluttered up with them that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote a parody operetta called Utopia Limited. I also discovered — beginning around the turn of the century but gathering steam as the 20th century progressed, if progressed is the word — a strain of increasingly darker and more horrifying dystopias.

Why this change? In the 19th century, there had been many rapid technological, scientific and medical changes — improved sewer systems and sanitation, antiseptics such as carbolic acid, anesthesia, vaccination, advances in transportation and manufacturing, and many more. The future looked set to continue in this ever-rosier direction, or as Tennyson’s fiery young idealist put it in his poem “Locksley Hall,” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” (The metaphor came from trains, but Tennyson hadn’t looked very closely at the tracks: he thought they were concave.)

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The 19th century’s positive utopias were inspired, as well, by various radical social thinkers, including William Cobbett and Karl Marx, and by Christian socialists such as Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin. Many people still really believed that humankind was almost perfectible if only society could change the way it was organized. People wrote utopias — such as William Morris’s arts-and-crafts socialistic News from Nowhere or Edward Bellamy’s technically advanced utopia Looking Backward — because they really did think that humankind could do better than the inequality, social injustice, vice, dirt, disease and squalor the writers witnessed all around them. Their utopias are versions of the Before-and-After makeovers you used to see in women’s magazines. Before, a sloppy, sad, run-down failure; but add a nifty haircut, flattering wardrobe, more healthful diet, well-applied eyeshadow, and look! A smiling, energetic and sexier whole different person! (Though if the whole different person is smiling too eerily, watch out: You may be in a dystopia after all because, like the how-may-I-help-you women in The Stepford Wives, that person may be a robot.)

Along with the literary utopias, the 19th century spawned hundreds of actual ones — groups of people who set up new communities — from the socialist Finnish colonies on the west coast of Canada, to the Esperanto-speakers who thought that a universal language might result in world peace, to the Oneida Community that practised an intricate form of polygamy and morphed into a flatware company. These had as their ancestors a large number of utopian religious communities, ranging from the Quakers, a disruptive cult that would sometimes streak church gatherings before it settled down into the more sober-sided version that went in for oatmeal and prison reform, to the Shakers (who did away with sex — oddly enough, they have died out), to the Mennonites and Amish.

The 17th-century Puritan New Englanders began, too, as utopianists. The phrase “a city upon a hill, a light to all nations” may sound familiar, since it was used recently by an American president, but it was first attached to America in the 17th century by John Winthrop, and comes from the inspiring utopian prophecy in the Book of Isaiah crossed with a sermon by Jesus. The New England Colony saw itself as the City of God in action — like so many utopias, it was going to start again and do things right this time. However, as Hawthorne pointed out, the first public-works items the colony built were a prison and a scaffold — acknowledgements of its own dystopic underbelly.

The 19th-century literary utopias concentrated less on religious structures and more on material improvements, but the lustre of both physical and spiritual utopian light dimmed considerably in the 20th century. Despite this dimming, in the burst of Edwardian splendour that preceded the First World War there were brilliant upflarings of utopianism in the world of art, now dubbed, collectively, “utopian modernism.” These European art movements wished not merely to reflect the world but to change it. Under this heading we find everything from Italian Futurism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl and Russian Constructivism: All wanted to overthrow established ideas and conventions and set up their own new and improved versions.

Though utopian from their own point of view, some of these movements are dystopian from ours; indeed, in their frequent celebration of violence, they point to a recurring motif in literary as well as in political utopian thinking: The brave new order often comes about as the result of war and chaos.

Then along came the real war — the Great War — which did change the world but at horrifying cost. And then, in this changed but not improved post-war world, several societies had a chance to practise utopian social engineering on a large scale. Most note worthy were the U.S.S.R. under Lenin and Stalin and Germany under Hitler. The result, in each case, was unprecedented bloodshed and the ultimate collapse of the supposedly utopian system.

Lest we assume that communists and Fascists were the only sorts of thinkers to go in for this sort of thing, there are many lesser-known entries in the list of failed utopias, including a capitalist- and-workers’ paradise set up by Henry Ford in the 1920s and 1930s. It was called “Fordlandia,” after its founder, and has recently been the subject of two books, both of them called Fordlandia: A factual account by Greg Grandin and a novel by Eduardo Sguiglia. Fordlandia was situated in the backwoods of Brazil, where the happy workers were supposed to grow rubber trees to make tires for Henry Ford’s Fords; but despite urban planning, and swimming pools for management, and despite or perhaps because of Ford’s efforts to regiment all employees and turn them into teetotallers like himself, the community soon fell apart in a welter of corruption, waste, vice, snakebites, tropical diseases, violence and rebellion.

Why is it that when we grab for heaven — socialist or capitalist or even religious — we so often produce hell? I’m not sure, but so it is. Maybe it’s the lumpiness of human beings. What do you do with people who somehow just don’t or won’t fit into your grand scheme? All too often you stretch them on a Procrustean bed or dig a hole in the ground and shovel them into it. With so much stretching, hole-digging, and shovelling going on as the 20th century ground on, it was difficult to place faith in the construction of utopias, literary or otherwise. It became much easier to depict awful societies not as the tawdry Before side of an After happy-face future but as the much worse thing we might instead be heading toward. The future societies imagined by mid-and late-20th-century writers, and indeed by early-21st-century ones, are much more likely to be dark than bright.

Utopia, as you know, comes from Thomas More’s book of that name — which in his case may mean either “no place” or “good place,” or both. Some are of the opinion that More’s book was a sort of joke: utopia can’t exist because fallen human nature doesn’t permit it. Nevertheless, his term stuck, and now, by general usage, utopias are thought to portray ideal societies or some version of them. Their program is to do away with the ills that plague us, such as wars, social inequality, poverty and famine, gender inequalities, fallen arches, and the like. (People — especially women— are always better looking in 19th-century utopias than the authors thought they were in real life.)

Dystopias are usually described as the opposite of utopias — they are Great Bad Places rather than Great Good Places and are characterized by suffering, tyranny and oppression of all kinds. Some books contain both — a sort of “look on this picture, then on that,” as Hamlet puts it — one, noble and virtuous; the other, corrupt and vicious. Polar opposites.

But scratch the surface a little, and — or so I think — you see something more like a yin and yang pattern; within each utopia, a concealed dystopia; within each dystopia, a hidden utopia, if only in the form of the world as it existed before the bad guys took over. Even in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — surely one of the most unrelievedly gloomy dystopias ever concocted — utopia is present, though minimally, in the form of an antique glass paperweight and a little woodland glade beside a stream. As for the utopias, from Thomas More onwards, there is always provision made for the renegades, those who don’t or won’t follow the rules: prison, enslavement, exile, exclusion or execution.

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